Constructor: Ben PallRelative difficulty: Easy
THEME: blank IT OR blank IT— four phrases that follow that pattern:
Theme answers:- TAKE IT OR LEAVE IT (17A: "This is my final offer")
- LOVE IT OR HATE IT (25A: Like something that's polarizing)
- MOVE IT OR LOSE IT (43A: "Get out of the way!")
- MAKE IT OR BREAK IT (57A: Having no middle ground between success and failure)
Word of the Day: Muriel BOWSER (
49A: D.C. mayor Muriel) —
Muriel Elizabeth Bowser (born August 2, 1972) is an American politician serving as the eighth mayor of the District of Columbia since 2015. A member of the Democratic Party, she previously represented Ward 4 as a member of the Council of the District of Columbia from 2007 to 2015. She is the second female mayor of the District of Columbia after Sharon Pratt, and the first woman to be reelected to that position.
Elected to the Advisory Neighborhood Commission in 2004, Bowser was elected to the council in a special election in 2007, to succeed Adrian Fenty, who had been elected Mayor. She was reelected in 2008 and 2012 and ran for mayor in the 2014 election. She defeated incumbent mayor Vincent C. Gray in the Democratic primary and won the general election against three Independent and two minor party candidates with 55% of the vote. In 2018, she won a second term with 76% of the vote. (wikipedia)
• • •
Only vaguely noticed the theme as I was solving, just enough to have an OK idea of the phrase structure, which turned out to be the whole theme, so maybe my sense of the theme was more than vague after all. Anyway, there's not a lot there, and the four theme phrases are not equally strong, by any means.
TAKE IT OR LEAVE IT and
MOVE IT OR LOSE IT are unimpeachable, solid, just fine.
LOVE IT OR HATE IT starts to skid a little, as it doesn't seem as snappy, and anyway, if I hear "LOVE IT OR..." my brain is completing that phrase with the admittedly horrid but nonetheless stronger ending, "... LEAVE IT," which, of course, you've already used in the "TAKE IT..." answer. But I'm happy to let
LOVE IT OR HATE IT stand. It's
MAKE IT OR BREAK IT that feels all kinds of off. There are "make-or-break" situations, but you would not use the phrase
MAKE IT OR BREAK IT. No you would not. If you google "make or break," you see that it's an honest-to-god idiomatic adjectival phrase, defined by many different sites on the first page of hits, whereas if you google "
MAKE IT OR BREAK IT," the only hits you get relate to a short-lived TV show about gymnastics from roughly a decade ago. So the TV show title is skewing the results massively, in terms of total hits, but *all* those hits refer to the TV show, not the phrase as it might be (but definitely is not) used in normal everyday conversation. You're better off ditching the wobbly
MAKE IT OR BREAK IT, giving your grid mirror symmetry rather than rotational symmetry, and making your fourth themer USE IT OR LOSE IT (a very very real thing that is conspicuous in its absence today).
This felt easy, though there were a lot of places where I hesitated or at least screwed up my face with a "really?" expression. I always hear / use "STOP *and* GO" traffic, so I didn't feel that great / confident writing in
STOPGO (6D: Halting, as rush-hour traffic). There was a HAIR ___ and an ART ___, neither of which was instantly clear to me, and I have friends who work for RED HAT, so I knew the DVD kiosks weren't called that, but I went with something that sounded kinda like that, which is RED DOT. But the answer is
RED BOX. Huh. I've seen those kiosks a ton, never really registered what it was that was RED. The kiosks are red, that's for sure. But BOX, sure, OK, I just used crosses to figure it out (
45D: Big name in DVD rental kiosks). Would not have been able to answer Muriel
BOWSER off the top of my head, but I have heard of her, so crosses got me there. Haven't watched network TV for years and years, so I'm only vaguely aware of who celebrity judges are on the various pointless awful talent shows that "American Idol" bequeathed to the world. I know Adam
LEVINE as the lead singer of "Maroon 5." As a TV judge, not so much (
10D: Adam ___, longtime panelist on "The Voice"). I also had -AL- at
39A: Lip service? and wrote in TALK. Seemed right. It wasn't (it's
BALM). As you can see, that's a lot of rough patches for a Monday. But the rest of it was so easy that the rough patches hardly seemed to matter. Easy-peasy. I neither loved it nor hated it, though I did kinda hate
MAKE IT OR BREAK IT. The end.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
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